At the turn of the century (man, that sounds historical) hundreds of college students were returning or had returned to the San Francisco Bay Area from their respective universities all over the country. Many of these people were searching for a community similar to those they had in college. Going to class together, eating together, hanging out together, and worshipping together all the time. Living life together all the time. In most cases, the churches these young professionals had grown up in did not meet these needs. So they left looking for something more.

In 2001 members of Newsong Irvine planted a church in Sunnyvale called Great Exchange Covenant. It flourished. People found a contemporary worship style more in line with what they had experience in college. Strong communities were formed. Lives were changed… people were transformed. And this didn’t just happen in the Bay Area. It was happening everywhere.

I attend an offspring church of this movement in San Francisco. We are a family of people who predominantly have an Asian heritage. Read: we have lots of Asian-Americans.

We are not an Asian American church.

Part of the original draw of attending GrX for some was that, well, it wasn’t their home church. Asian-American family churches around the Bay Area panicked as they were slowly losing their young adults to churches similar to GrX. They strategized how to keep their young adults happy. They vilified those that left for what they perceived as the new hip thing. “Oh, you go to GrX” translated to “Oh, you’re one of those abandoners.”

But the draw of the “new hip thing” wasn’t just that they could miss service on Sunday morning without their parents finding out. It was structured differently. The “english ministry” wasn’t just a secondary service. You didn’t call the “english pastor” the “EM Pastor” because he was, well, “the pastor”. Fabulous. No Asian-American church hierarchy. No Asian-American church patriarchy. No Asian-American church politics.

Natural leaders emerged. They heeded the call to service, acting as what the traditional church might have called deacons at the ripe old age of 25. They ministered to each other. They ministered to others. They flourished.

Church politics are not something unique to Asian-American churches. It’s universal. As far as I see it there are two ways of completely avoiding church politics. 1) attend a church so new as to have not had to run into these political conflicts (yet). 2) attend church, but remove yourself from these politics by either not getting involved and/or by attending a church so big as to have too many layers between you and the top for you to even remotely come in to contact with church politics.

The politics came to the “new hip thing”, almost as a sign of maturity, and the dream-like bubble of the faultless church popped. It popped big.

The draw of the “new hip thing” for those that had previously attended Asian-American churches also partially involved the absence of the traditional Asian-American church hierarchy. The English Ministry Pastor was usually under the Senior Pastor. The deacons were predominantly not a part of the English Ministry. Everything was run by those that you did not necessarily commune with or even know for that matter. Things got done (building decisions, hiring, finances) all without your opinion or input. You had no say, and thus you didn’t care.

I don’t go to an Asian-American church, but I see people acting like they do. Week-in. Week-out. I am guilty of this too. In my time I have left 3 churches that I didn’t feel met my needs. I also did nothing to help myself.

In the “new hip thing” you hung out with your Pastor. You attended the same small group as one of the “deacons”. You threw back beers with the music ministry director. Everything got done (building decisions, hiring, finances) all without your opinion or input. You had a say this time, but it turns out you didn’t really care.

Many of these people were searching for a community similar to those they had in college. Now they were going to work together, eating together, hanging out together, and worshipping together all the time. Living life together all the time. In some cases, the churches these young professionals had started to grow in to did not meet all their needs.  So they left looking for something more… or they grew up and, like the deacons at pastors at the churches they grew up in, they did something to fulfill their needs for themselves and others.

Freemium: one of the single most ridiculous Web 2.0 terms ever.

You may not be familiar with the term freemium, but… you are. The term coined by Web 2.0-er Jarid Lukin, is articulated by a venture capitalist as giving “your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.”

Along with a plethora of mobile apps, Skype, Flickr, and Dropbox all operate on a freemium model. And with the success of the freemium model for companies like these, many startups have followed suit.

There’s just one big hurdle to jump.

Skype, Flickr, and Dropbox all offer awesome products. In fact, I am or have been a premium subscriber to each of those services at some point in time. The product rocks. What you get free already has an intrinsic value.

But the issue for so many web startups is that their free sucks. When your free product is worth exactly what your users are paying (pssssst, that’s nothing, worthless, zilch, you suck at life and you should end yourself) why would a user pay more for expanded features? You haven’t proven your worth to them, and the added benefits to subscribing to your Awesomr Pro Premium Plan become nothing more than bullet points on a subscription page.

As a web developer I have sorted through lots and lots of other people’s crappy code. I once paid for a PHP Classifieds Script that was full of invalid markup and a dysfunctional payment module. The solution seemed to be to pay even more for a third-party payment integrator. When I paid it seemed the integrator did not work either and when I emailed the developer I was offered a lame explanation and finger pointing at PayPal. Coincidentally, a disclaimer was placed on this fellows site the next day stating that the module didn’t actually work.

Tonight, I was once again faced with PHP scripts. In the course of hooking up a free add-on module, I realized that the company offering the module had purposely left out some features with the hopes that you would upgrade to a $40 “Gold Package” or spring for a $199 “Developer License”. “Your code is messy and really God awful”, I thought. “Why would I pay you?” So within 15 minutes I had hacked around to reach what the Gold Package would have supposedly given me and 2 hours later I was cleaning up code that I am fairly certain would not have been fixed with the Developer License.

So to all you want to be startup crazies: freemium only works when your free is premium, and not when your premium should be free.

I am writing this from a BlackBook. It is the best personal computer I have ever owned. As a side note, it is not the best one I will ever own. Every day I see deals on unibody MacBook Pros, but they don’t come in black, so I’m keeping this laptop until it kicks the bucket because I think Apple is awesome.

I work daily on a 27″ iMac. It is the best work rig I have ever had the privilege of hacking on. The iMac is connected to an Apple Time Capsule and a Mac Server, and we as a firm have various testing iPads scattered around Australia, New Zealand, and the good old U.S. of A because we think Apple is awesome.

I have a small collection of iPods starting with a limited U2 iPod, a 3rd Gen iPod Nano, and a 2nd Gen iPod Touch. EFF a Zune.

Given all this one might think I am a fan boy. As a disclaimer, that wouldn’t be that far from the truth and I quite clearly have my biases. But what do I carry in my pocket?

November of last year I picked up the, now obsolete, Motorola Droid. This was Motorola’s flagship model running Google’s Android Mobile OS. Prior to that I had been on a BlackBerry Pearl. Cute little thing. Tiny screen, weird double key keyboard that all of its users somehow got used to and enjoyed.

So why no iPhone? Three characters, one repeated: AT&T. I started my mobile life on Cingular which became AT&T. And when that went downhill our family switched to Verizon and have lived happily ever after. So pledging allegiance to VZW I marched down to get me a Droid.

“You can do whatever YOU want with it, unlike the locked down iPhone.” Clearly this gentleman had been to the required Android sales training session. The Droid was being marketed as a symbol of freedom. Go anywhere, do anything… Droid does. “Oh, yeah… that’s cool”, I replied with a chuckle. He then proceeded to show me things that I could do with my iPod Touch. At some point I just started acting impressed because it was clear to me he didn’t get that I knew how to use a smartphone.

In the back of my mind I thought what this so-called freedom and openness that Verizon was pushing meant for me. I started having grandiose dreams of developing Android applications. To date I have developed more than negative one Android applications. This freedom meant I could at least change my wallpaper. That was cool. In fact it was among the first things I did when I get home. And then I realized the awkward multiple main screen interface meant needing to make seamless backgrounds or to live with designs that weren’t based on a central object. The phone was cool enough. But the freedom did not live up to expectations. I wanted the freedom to just have one main screen.

Fast forward to a month or so ago with the release of Android 2.2 (Froyo). Cool. I upgraded automatically. My battery life got better. The interface was polished and seemed less like beta software. I felt like I had the phone that my Droid was supposed to be when it came out, except with inferior hardware as compared to all the new fangled Android phones. Except, I didn’t have the freedom to tether. No big deal.

About two weeks ago with Verizon’s additional update to Froyo to support Adobe Flash. To be quite honest, I just wasn’t interested. I had lived without Flash on my mobile for nearly a year. It was clear I could live without it, and I didn’t want to deal with upgrading right at the moment they sent the notice. I chose not to upgrade right at that moment. About a half-hour later, the message popped up again. I still wasn’t ready because I didn’t have a full rundown of what was being upgraded, and a quick scour of the internet message boards did not yet have an answer yet either. So much for openness.

For the last two weeks this upgrade message has now popped up more or less every time I use my phone. My refusal to upgrade at first was a want to wait, but now it has turned in to a daily protest. I was being sold openness and freedom, but I haven’t been told what is about to go on my phone (lack of openness) and it looks like I have no choice but to “upgrade” (lack of freedom). Furthermore, should I upgrade and decide to install say a rooted and improved version of Android OS, I have been told Verizon will chop off my head. Remember, I was told I can do whatever I want with this phone.

Verizon is like any other carrier. They want full control of their ecosystem. It somewhat makes sense. You play poker at someone’s home game, you play by the house rules. But you sold me on freedom and openness. I have experienced neither of these things. The cost of supplying data services to their customers hasn’t become cheaper as time has gone by. In fact, carriers are losing per subscriber revenue every year, so it’s no wonder they want you to play by their rules (READ: choke you for data costs and neuter your phone capabilities).

Google is somewhat of an enigma. Mobile users don’t click as many ads. Google is smart enough to know this. The real money to be made in mobile these days is from licensing and taking a cut of software development. Google’s Marketplace is a fragmented clusterflock of randomness, with inconsistent development guidelines and a lack of quality control.

I blame both. I blame Verizon for being Verizon. If they would have given up some control to Apple, I’m sure they could have made a hefty sum being the exclusive iPhone carrier. Instead, Verizon continues to slap their ugly logo front-and-center-cannot-miss-it on every phone on its network and continues to pollute each of these phones with some sort of Verizon permasoftware. Google is Verizon’s b*tch. Not just Verizon’s, but every other carrier. They do what the carrier wants just to get a phone in to a users hand. Verizon, I love you. But not as much as I hate your brandishing of perfectly good phones.

In the mobile market it looks like the main players are targeting distinct segments. BlackBerry obviously is married to the enterprise. Apple, I would argue, has positioned itself as the premium smartphone maker. Quality hardware and quality applications. So where does that leave Google? If Apple is marketing to the Bloomingdale’s shopper, Google is the JC Penney equivalent. Bloomingdale’s partners with luxury brands to bring high-quality, premium fashions to their customers. JC Penney partners with household, century-old brand names to bring functional products to the unrefined masses. For all that is awesome with Google, I hate Android.

If there’s one thing that Google needs to figure out, it is that online advertising strategies do not translate to the mobile market. On the web, Google wants tons of ads delivered to people faster and faster. They know that on average an ad might get clicked on 2% of the times it’s seen. The larger the pie, the bigger the 2% is in quantity, and the more money they rake in. More handsets to more people just doesn’t translate the same way. People are looking to interact with their mobiles quite quickly. They’re not surfing so they’re not clicking on ads on their phone. If they’re playing a game or using some other app, they’re there for the momentary distraction or the specific app content and not for the supporting ad content. The ads are ignored.

And the kicker… people will pay $199 for a phone, but they hesitate to pay $1.99 for an app. There are millions of free apps out there. Even if the free apps suck, the average consumer, and specifically the JC Penney consumer, will consider the paid equivalent to be far too expensive.

So here’s my suggestion to Google… but it’s really far too late. Target the market that pays. Well, you can’t do that. You’re the mobile OS for the cheap (m)asses. Clean up the Marketplace. Well, you can’t do that. You’re promoting openness and freedom. That’s how you’ve marketed this from the get go. And finally, stop being the carriers’ b*tch. Well, you can’t do that. You’re trying to get as many phones as you possibly can out to as many users as possible so that they can feed money in to your business model that just plain doesn’t work.